1956 Chevrolet Truck Project - Blast Off!

The upper half of the cab and the majority of steel in the interior, such as the dash, door pillars, and inner roof skin are in pretty good shape compared to the rest of the cab.

The last and final step before sending the cab and doors off to the media blaster is to remove the bed and rear fenders as well as the front clip. Then the lower portions of the cab can be inspected one final time.

Nothing else grabbed our attention as being particularly heinous, though there were some definite areas that would require some serious attention, so it was decided to send the cab and doors off to the blasters. We decided to hold off on sending out the rest of the sheetmetal until we got the cab and chassis sorted out.

Over at Blasting Specialties and Powder-coating, here’s a close up of the media that they used to get our truck down to bare metal.

Here’s a good shot of the blasted area at the corner of the cab (right) compared to the still painted area (left). Note the layers of primer and paint that are visible that all work in conjunction to hide problem areas in old trucks.

The lower cab corners on our truck are perfect examples of what old paint and body filler can hide.

Thought they looked okay, underneath all that old junk was a pair of patch panels that were done rather crudely; and something we’ll want to replace!

Without having sandblasted the truck, it’s doubtful we would have uncovered the problem areas. Here, you can see the technique used to attach the patch panels before they were tack welded into place and skimmed over with filler. “Just a coupl’a rivets oughta do the job …”

Here’s the ’56 back from the blaster.

It doesn’t look too bad from ten or fifteen feet away … but upon closer inspection, what looked bad before looks particularly ugly now.

While the area around the front body bolts looked pretty bad before, it’s now painfully obvious that the entire mounting area is going to need to be replaced on both sides.

The hinge pocket sections on the driver’s side were also ravaged by cancer over the years …

… as was the step pocket area on the passenger side.

In addition to the damage to the rear body mount, we found that the seam where the backside of the cab met the floor was also pretty rotten.

Another area where someone had performed some rather shoddy bodywork in the past was on the roof, where a number of dents were present, filled with body filler in a haphazard manner.

The body filler allowed moisture to get underneath it, resulting in surface rust under the paint to form. This then caused the filler and paint above it to buckle.

We’ll be tackling all the problem areas on the ’56 in the months to come, but in the meantime, Jason shot some Eastwood self-etching primer on the bare metal body to buy us some time before the cab starts rusting again.

Now it can sit in the shop without the fear of developing surface rust until the next time we get around to working on it.